laptop powers off by it's self

[ejaggers]

I've been ripped off twice, trying to get my daughters laptop fixed. It powers off for no reason. When she came home from college (twice), I tried having it fixed, and when she went back the problem occured again. The 1st guy said over heating and charged me $90. The second charged me $60. So I tried myself last night. I put in the recovery disk that came with this Acer computer, and I assumed that it re-installed XP/home. But that did not fix it.

To reproduce the problem you do a scan, any scan. Norton, AVG, or Reg Mechanic. It has a C and D partition, and the problem seems to be scanning C. I’m thinking the whole drive should be wiped clean and XP re-installed, but I thought that’s what the recovery disk did, to drive C at least (it did not touch D though).

Can Anyone Help!!!

 

[linney]

The Recovery Disk most probably restored your computer to the Factory Defaults, which would have meant that you lost all the data and installed programs and updates, or, if you were lucky, it was a non-destructive recovery, saving your data and installed programs, but removing all Windows Updates.

Have you tried testing the memory with a RAM checking program?

http://www.memtest86.com/

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

The hard drive manufacturer will have free diagnostic software to thoroughly check the condition of your hard drive.

Overheating could be a possible cause. Perhaps some software similar to this will allow you to monitor the temperature?

Core Temp 0.99.4

http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/

 

[ejaggers]

linney,

I don't think it's over heating because allegedly they checked/fixed that, if it was a problem in the first place. Thanks for explaining the recovery disk. So can I assume that it didn’t re-install XP? If not, couldn’t XP still be the culprit?

I haven’t tried these tools but I will tonight. I was thinking a bad virus because I can reproduce it at will by scanning. My daughter probably doesn’t scan but it shuts off on her anyway.

I see that many others on the web have this problem, and almost everyone on the web is saying it’s over heating, but I haven’t seen any other solutions. Thanks for giving me so other things to check. What do you think of wiping out the disk, and starting from scratch. I realize that this is extreme but I’m not sure what else to do.

 

[supertech2000]

I had a laptop with a simular problem. The fan would stop working and then the laptop would shut off. Turns out it was the metal shroud around the fan that was bent a little out of shape and once in a while would bind up the fan. I straightened out the shroud and all is well. Try the fan and surrounding components.

 

[linney]

The Recovery will have performed one of the options I outlined, WHILE IT REINSTALLED (or repaired) XP, dependent on its' (Recovery CD) capabilities, and any choice of options you selected. It will have done something along those lines otherwise what is the point of running it?

Scanning is a procedure that will make any machine's processor run hotter than normal as it is very process intensive, more so than the day to day run of the mill other programs that you run.

Is your machine powering off, and staying off, or is it automatically restarting?

If it is the latter, then disabling Automatic Restarts, and checking out the Event Viewer is an option.

How do I view the error messages registered in Event Log?

http://www.winxptutor.com/eventlog.htm

You can also turn off "automatically restart after an error" so it will just halt at the fault and display the full Stop Error and blue screen.

Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties .
On the Advanced tab, click Settings under Startup and Recovery .
Click to clear the Automatically restart check box under System failure , and then click OK . The error message on a blue screen should remain on the screen so you can record the error information.

If it is remaining off, then your machine is shutting down to prevent damage occurring.

You can try your scans from Safe Mode if you like. AVG will run in Safe Mode if you click on the Desktop icon while in Safe Mode.

 

[linney]

You aren't running two virus scanners on your machine, are you? I see you mention both Norton and AVG. That is a "no no", as they will almost certainly conflict with one and another, and maybe be a cause of serious problems.

 

[ejaggers]

lenney,
When it shuts off it’s like it completely lost power all of a sudden. It does not restart, and when you restart, it goes into the mode: “I shutdown wrong and I must do a disk scan”, before it boots. I believe I’ve looked in the event log in the past and found nothing. The recovery disk doesn’t give options other than, “put in next disk”, nor did it come this any documentation. I didn't try safe mode last night because it was late, and can't remember if I tried it last time she was home. I will try it tonight, but I think it will bomb, because I probably did last time.

 

[ejaggers]

I'm not running two virus scan at the same time. In fact I ran AVG first, because that's what I use,and it bombed. I uninstalled it and installed Norton, because it came with the recovery disks, and it also bombed. I think